Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

Look, I haven't ever heard that one but I think you can wake them up and particularly if they're moving around the house, it's important to wake them up because they're not aware of what they're doing in a way that you or I are if they're walking to the fridge and opening the fridge and they could hurt themselves.

It depends what stage of sleep they're in.

If they're in non-REM sleep,

they're usually quite amenable to if you just lead them and say, look, let's just go back to bed and you can just lightly grab their arm and then lead them off into the bedroom and they'll probably just jump back into bed and go off to sleep.

So, you know, I think you can wake them up and you probably should because otherwise they could hurt themselves.

So for people with narcolepsy, their brain and body just wants them to be asleep most of the time.

And that's because they don't have orexin in the body.

It helps with that.

So they don't have that.

And so their body always wants to be asleep.

And so for them, they need to have more sleep than we do.

So, you know, if we need seven to nine hours as an adult to feel rested, they might need 10 or 11 hours.

So they need more sleep overall.

But also for them, having a 20-minute nap can actually be very restorative and

to help to maintain wakefulness.

So they can just fall asleep at the drop of a hat, particularly if they haven't had a lot of sleep.

And we do tend to use various medications to maintain alertness, but there are times when they would need to have a power nap.

you know, it's very challenging if you have narcolepsy because trying to have a nap during the day when you're at work, you know, your employer may not understand why you need that.

Right.

Well, I mean, I think some organisations, they understand that.